Resources for Innovation – The Power of Constraints

The wise stewardship of resources is the task of any organization. How those resources are deployed for maximum gain is the key responsibility of organizational leadership. The only problem with this concept is what happens when wise stewardship comes up hard against the necessary risking of resources for the material benefit of innovation? Unfortunately, in the present “economic unpleasantness” as a dear friend keeps calling the train wreck that is this great recession, stewardship of resources has digressed to hoarding of resources. Save for one notable exception – human resources.

The Politics of Innovation – Dodging the Seagulls in “Finding Nemo”

…Business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else.
- James Surowiecki

Playing Games With Innovation
Let’s be blunt, innovation has become the latest political football in many organizations and the competition around owning it has become fierce, if not ugly. For those organizations who do not know how to address [...]

Innovation Economies & The Benefit Of Creative Destruction

Today innovation sits at the heart of economic value creation. If the 1980’s were all about productivity, the 1990’s were about quality, and the 2000’s about globalization, the current decade will most likely be about the capacity of organization to harness the controlled chaos inherent in innovation to create value. With the acceleration of globalization process, innovation is more and more seen as the appropriate tool to create business value.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? (A call to arms from Seth Godin)

A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.
- Seth Godin, Linchpin

Genius Marketer Markets Book Ingeniously
If Seth Godin was doing anything with his past books it was perhaps leading a trail of breadcrumbs to this current book, Linchpin. Where Tribes (2008) was a call to finding a following [...]

Bill Gates’ 2010 Annual Letter focuses on Innovation

Gates: This is my second annual letter. The focus of this year’s letter is innovation and how it can make the difference between a bleak future and a bright one.
2009 was the first year my full-time work was as co-chair of the foundation, along with Melinda and my dad. It’s been an incredible year and [...]

Innovation Is Not A Strategy

Why Blue Sky Thinking Does Not A Blue Ocean Make
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
- Sun Tzu

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
The confused merging of strategy (specifically strategy formulation) and innovation in business circles is alarming. Both strategic thinking and thinking about [...]

Measuring Successful Innovation – It’s not about the Benjamins*

Now we’ve got around seven thousand people working, and that to me is fantastically satisfying.. more than dollars and cents, because I just believe that the greatest thing you can give someone is a job.
- Janet Holmes à Court (one of Australia’s richest business people)
I was having a conversation over lunch recently about ways to [...]

Innovation Trapped – Rethinking the flow of ideas to market

I think we do need to move very swiftly in creating value for consumers and reacting to the economics.
- Brian Becker
On BusinessWeek’s website recently (November 9, 2009), Vivek Wadhwa posted a ViewPoint column focused on the implication of globally outsourced innovation. While what he reviewed was not necessarily earth-shattering in its revelations it did highlight [...]

Advisors & Agents – Reflections on the Trust Summit NYC October 23

After the not-so-timely NJ Transit deposited me in Manhattan bright and early this morning I made my way with my good mate Vijay to the Harvard Club for the Trust Summit. This breakfast event brought together the authors (David Maister and Charles H. Green) of one of my professional services bibles, The Trusted Advisor, with [...]

Emergence in Organizations

Emergence is a key property of complex systems. It is also, many believe, the key to fundamental change in human organisations. In this article the author proposes that while emergence is neither predictable nor controllable there are some factors which predispose an organisation towards emergent change. He also notes that those factors may be influenced [...]